Original Scholarly Monograph

Feminist theorists have often argued that aesthetic surgeries and body makeovers dehumanize and disempower women patients, whose efforts at self-improvement lead to their objectification. Amending the Abject Body proposes that although objectification is an important element in this phenomenon, the explosive growth of "makeover culture" can be understood as a process of both abjection (ridding ourselves of the unwanted) and identification (joining the community of what Julia Kristeva calls "clean and proper bodies"). Drawing from the advertisement and advocacy of body makeovers on television, in aesthetic surgery trade books, and in the print and Web-based marketing of face lifts, tummy tucks, and Botox injections, Deborah Caslav Covino articulates the relationship among objectification, abjection, and identification, and offers a fuller understanding of contemporary beauty-desire.

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva offers an extensive and profound consideration of the nature of abjection. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, she analyzes the nature of attitudes toward repulsive subjects and examines the function of these topics in the writings of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and other authors. Kristeva identifies the abject with the eruption of the real and the presence of death. She explores how art and religion each offer ways of purifying the abject, arguing that amid abjection, boundaries between subject and object break down.

In Abject Performances Leticia Alvarado draws out the irreverent, disruptive aesthetic strategies used by Latino artists and cultural producers who shun standards of respectability that are typically used to conjure concrete minority identities. In place of works imbued with pride, redemption, or celebration, artists such as Ana Mendieta, Nao Bustamante, and the Chicano art collective known as Asco employ negative affects—shame, disgust, and unbelonging—to capture experiences that lie at the edge of the mainstream, inspirational Latino-centered social justice struggles. Drawing from a diverse expressive archive that ranges from performance art to performative testimonies of personal faith-based subjection, Alvarado illuminates modes of community formation and social critique defined by a refusal of identitarian coherence that nonetheless coalesce into Latino affiliation and possibility.

Leading art critic and philosopher Arthur Danto here explains how the anti-beauty revolution was hatched, and how the modernist avant-garde dislodged beauty from its throne. Danto argues not only that the modernists were right to deny that beauty is vital to art, but also that beauty is essential to human life and need not always be excluded from art.

"Abject Relations presents an alternative approach to anorexia, through detailed ethnographic investigations. Megan Warin looks at the heart of what it means to live with anorexia on a daily basis. Unraveling anorexia's complex relationships and contradictions, Warin provides a new theoretical perspective rooted in a socio-cultural context of bodies and gender. Abject Relations departs from conventional psychotherapy approaches and offers a different logic, one that involves the shifting forces of power, disgust, and desire and provides new ways of thinking that may have implications for future treatment regimes." --Publisher.

Inspired by the dichotomy of beauty and the grotesque in relation to the female body, I set out to both find a balance and interrupt the balance between the two with my artistic practice. Defining beauty as something more significant and meaningful than a pretty image and the abject as something that inspires repulsion, I sought to find connection between the two. Through creating abject textures surrounding nude female forms, I discovered an underlying trauma latent in the artistic expressions of my work. The process of creating abject works of art has lead to catharsis and posttraumatic growth in my personal life and artistic practice. Through the work I have found beauty in the abject and abjection in beauty.